Layoffs are ramping up across the federal government.
Yesterday, the Trump administration told agencies to cut most of the 200,000 workers who are on “probation” or new enough to their jobs that they don’t have permanent status yet. It’s part of an effort to cut deep — and to empower Elon Musk at the newly created Department of Government Efficiency to shape what remains in the aftermath.
This is unfolding now, and it’s not clear exactly how many people will be cut. But that’s hardly the only uncertainty. We know the shake-up may boost Musk’s business interests. But agency to agency, we know very little about the strategy behind the specific cuts, or whether or not there is one.
Are agencies cutting employees believed to be redundant or expendable? Or are they cutting just to cut? What happens when thousands of people leave the Department of Veterans Affairs, or the major health agencies? In short: What comes next?
These do not seem to be the kinds of questions that bother Musk. Just look to his corporate record, something my colleagues did shortly after the election. When he took over Twitter, he quickly shed more than 75 percent of the work force, which meant that sometimes stuff just broke. He ignored bills for office leases and at one point stopped paying for janitorial services at Twitter’s offices.
But his uncompromising frugality helped him save money at SpaceX and Tesla, my colleagues noted.
The business strategy was simple: Slash now, fix later. Cut with a machete, not a scalpel, and see what breaks. Any failures that follow are simply part of the process. That’s the strategy he’s deploying now — and it’s not how government usually works.
“You don’t have high highs and low lows,” Jeff T. H. Pon, who ran the Office of Personnel Management during President Trump’s first term, told my colleague David Fahrenthold earlier today. “You have meh. But there’s something to be said about stability and meh.”
The real question for Musk and President Trump might be whether they can actually fix broken bureaucracies, not just cut them. Below, David has a tale that illustrates just how hard that might be.
Today’s top stories
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The I.R.S. is expecting to lay off thousands, starting as soon as next week, and layoffs began at the Energy Department.
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Musk’s work is irking some White House officials, including Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff, Reuters reports. The news agency writes that Wiles recently relayed to Musk that she wants to be in the loop on DOGE’s work.
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DOGE’s website was hacked almost immediately after its redesign, Fortune writes.
AGENCY STATUS REPORT
The mine where government records go to get lost
On Tuesday in the Oval Office, Elon Musk told a story about bureaucratic inefficiency that might have sounded too weird to be true.
Federal employees’ retirement benefits are “manually calculated,” he said, and “written down on a piece of paper.”
“Then,” he said, “it goes down in a mine.”
It’s true. I’ve been there.
In the 1950s, the government moved its human resources files into a series of old limestone mines, 230 feet below Boyers, Pa. The space was the draw — the mines can hold 28,000 file cabinets. In time, the government also shifted the workers who processed those files into the mine.
In 2014, I wrote a story about the mine for The Washington Post. The office was one of the strangest I’ve ever visited. There were the usual cubicles, copy machines and coffee mugs — but, above it all, there was roof of jagged rock, covered in metal mesh to keep rocks from falling on employees’ heads. There was no cafeteria: An open flame might ignite gases seeping from the rock. Instead, a pizza man with a security clearance came once a day, at 11:30 a.m.
There’s little doubt the mine is a paragon of inefficiency.
When a federal employee retires, the workers gather the employee’s personnel records and go through a Byzantine series of calculations to determine the worker’s benefits.
The mine relies on paper. Lots of it. Workers told me they would spend months badgering agencies for a single form, or a signature, to complete the paper file. If one of them lost a piece of paper, it was irreplaceable. The whole office would stop to join the search.
When I visited, almost 11 years ago, it took workers an average of 61 days to process one case. The same as in 1977. Since then, the mine has not gotten better. In January, workers needed 64 days to process one case, even slower than when I visited.
Many efforts to automate this process have failed, unable to bridge the different computer systems used by various agencies. The problem isn’t laziness. It is a total mismatch between the complexity of the job, and the complexity of the systems the government had built to do it.
That’s why it was so interesting that Musk mentioned it this week. The mine presents exactly the kind of messy engineering problem that his team has been avoiding so far — and it stands as a test of whether they’re willing to fix a hard problem, instead of just cutting. The White House and Musk’s team did not respond to my questions.
More DOGE updates:
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The Pentagon isn’t waiting for Musk’s team to arrive. Officials are preparing proposed cuts, including to weapons systems that have been on the chopping block before, according to The Wall Street Journal.
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A federal judge ordered the Trump administration to unfreeze the foreign aid spending President Trump halted during his first week.
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Trump administration officials are preparing to fire most of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s staff and begin deleting agency data, a lawyer representing bureau staff, said in a court hearing on Friday.
MEANWHILE on X
Musk cheers on Vance
Vice President JD Vance stunned European leaders on Friday with a speech criticizing their immigration policies and targeting their attempts to marginalize far-right parties.
But Vance had one big fan on X.
“Make Europe Great Again!” Musk posted. “MEGA, MEGA, MEGA.”
Musk has increasingly involved himself in European politics. He’s forged a friendship with the right-leaning Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni. And last month, he hosted Alice Weidel, the leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany in a livestreamed conversation on X.
Since then, he has campaigned for her party, known as the AfD, and, as my colleagues wrote Thursday, often aligned himself with narratives used in Russian disinformation campaigns targeting the upcoming German election.
In his speech, Vance dismissed any concerns that misinformation could sway elections. “If American democracy can survive 10 years of Greta Thunberg’s scolding, you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk,” Vance said.
Musk posted that portion of the remarks and responded with two laughing emojis.
AN UNSOLICITED OFFER
‘Not for sale’
OpenAI’s board of directors has unanimously rejected a $97.4 billion bid by Musk and a consortium of investors. The effort was an attempt to gain control of the artificial intelligence company — or perhaps just meddle with its plans to restructure.
Musk and OpenAI’s chief executive, Sam Altman, have a longstanding and, apparently, deepening feud. And yet, as Times reporters Cecilia Kang and Cade Metz wrote recently, Musk hasn’t boxed Altman out of Trump’s orbit.
In a statement, Bret Taylor, the chairman of the OpenAI board, said, “OpenAI is not for sale.”
BY THE NUMBERS
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That’s the total number of agencies where members of the Department of Government Efficiency have been at work, according to a tally confirmed by my colleagues. The list includes nearly every cabinet-level department, as well as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
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